a Cash-for-Admission theatre, with certain other innovations, he
struck at once on a genuine and deeply revolted sense of honor
and decency in his new acquaintance.
"No," he said stoutly: "I hope you wont take it in bad part,
old man: upon my soul I do; but though Fm not straitlaced, Ive
always played the game; and I always shall play the game."
And it was only when Gerald asked him to sit down again and
explain exactly what the game was—a thing it had never yet oc-
curred to Denbigh to consider—that the conscience which the
acting manager had always felt at his back, like a rock, turned to
water and let him through into the abyss at the bottom of which
the disgrace of cash-for-admission was gilded by a bank account
with one hundred thousand pounds to its credit. Even when
Gerald had turned all his pleas and arguments inside out, and
forced him to confess that toadying and humbugging Glossop
was not a man's work, and was good neither for Glossop nor him-
self; that an imposture was none the less an imposture because
everybody except the outsiders (meaning all who were not ac-
complices) knew it to be an imposture; that in spite of the enor-
mous prices paid under his system for success, for social prestige,
for dramatic art, and even for a superficial air of gentility, none
of these things were really attained—all of which Denbigh at last
admitted as true "if you choose to look at it in that way"—he
still, whilst frankly owning that he could not justify his feelings
by argument, pleaded that he should feel a cad and a juggins and
anumberof odierindeterminate ignominious things if he did any-
thing but what Dabernoon did, what Durberville did, what, in
short, everybody did who was not that abject thing, an outsider.
But he consented at last: Gerald never knew exactly why. That
fancy for the theatre which had made him an acting manager in-
stead of any other sort of functionary in the great west end
fashion machine for squeezing money out of rich people must
have sprung, after all, from some aborted radicle of genuine ar-
tistic passion which made him hanker after a theatre which should
be a real theatre, driven by the same passion in real actors, real
authors, real audiences, instead of a simulacrum galvanized into a
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